With the right plugins, ChatGPT 4 — the latest version of OpenAI’s language model system — can be very useful for helping you complete a number of tasks. But, caveat emptor, even the most mature plugins are still, at best, beta quality. Used carefully, however, they can still help you get real work done.
The best ChatGPT plugins aren’t your run-of-the-mill, “makes your browser blink in different colors” plugins. (Although, if you really want to play with colors, there’s always Color Palette.) Instead, they add accuracy and functionality by incorporating third-party web services into your search.
Also: The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT and other noteworthy alternatives
I’ve rounded up the best ChatGPT plugins for different use cases below, based on my experience testing them out. For now, all the plugins listed here are free. That will not last. For example, while the WolframAlpha expert system has a free tier, its most useful level, Pro, runs $5 a month. Eventually, you’ll need to pay a subscription for this level of access to use its ChatGPT plugin. You can be sure many other programs will follow suit.
Here are the best ChatGPT plugins to help you get more done.
Pros
- Deliver useful travel and hotel results
Cons
- KAYAK doesn’t always answer your question as you posed them
Here’s a tie. Both the Expedia and the KAYAK transportation and hotel plugins are quite good. Both deliver human-like responses to simple questions: “What’s the best three-star hotel rate in mid-town Manhattan between July 10th and 14th?” They also do well with more open-ended, subtle questions such as “What’re the most fun things to do in Chicago in the summer with my eight-year-old between August 1st and 3rd?” Neither listed the Cubs games at Wrigley Field — Bad AI, Bad! — but both suggested reasonable kid-friendly activities.
However, you do need to look carefully at their results. For example, KAYAK, when I asked for city-center Munich hotels under 300 Euros, the top two answers were well above my price point.
Used with caution, both are useful. Unfortunately, you can’t use them together to fine-tune the answers you need for your next business trip. Still, since travel agents are as rare as hen’s teeth these days, it’s well worth using them.
Pros
- Works very well for helping you find data within a PDF file
Cons
- You must manually enter PDFs outside of ChatGPT before you can work with it
A lot of valuable information is stored in PDF files. The problem is pulling the answers from them, as PDF is not a researcher-friendly format. Numerous plugins can work with PDFs, but Ask Your PDF is the best.
This plugin does just what the name says. It reads through a PDF to find the answers to your questions. This can be very helpful. However, unlike the other best plugins, you need to work outside ChatGPT before it works. Here’s how to do it:
Manually upload the PDF to the AskYourPDF service with these steps:
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Go to AskYourPDF Upload Page.
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Click on the “Upload Document” button.
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Select the PDF file you want to upload from your device.
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Once the upload is complete, you will receive a document ID (doc_id).
You paste the doc_id into your ChatGPT query and use it to extract information from the PDF with the plugin.
It takes a bit of work, but the results are excellent. Unlike most ChatGPT and plugins, it gives you exactly where the information comes from within the document. If you work a lot with PDFs, or even if you only do it once in a blue moon, this is one handy utility.
Pros
- Enables you to integrate search with other plugins
- Does a good job of summarizing search results
Cons
- The need to use a plugin instead of having Bing search built in
Since you can’t use Bing search with plugins — darn it! — the next best thing is Link Reader. It also does just what the name says: It lets you pull up information for a specific page.
But, you can also use it for more general topics. So, for example, the query: “I want to catch up on the latest news concerning Ukraine, can you compile a list of articles for me to read? LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/us” will deliver you news from The Guardian and other news sites.
You can also use it to hunt down recent gardening stories, the latest baseball news, and on and on. In addition, it can dig through PDF, PPT, image, Word, and other documents for the information you’re seeking.
It also works well with other plugins, which makes it even more useful.
Pros
- Easily find and make restaurant reservations or a shopping list
Cons
- Can miss some obvious restaurants
Hungry? Don’t cook? Let the OpenTable plugin help. With it you can ask questions, just as if you had an expert local foodie friend, and get good answers.
Alas, good isn’t always perfect. For example, when I asked it about Indian restaurants in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, it gave me a decent list, but it somehow missed the 2022 James Beard Award winner for Outstanding Restaurant Chai Pan. Whoops! Still, it gives you a start for making a reservation for tonight’s dinner.
And if you want to cook a meal yourself, there’s always Instacart. With this plugin, you can create a “shoppable” list of the ingredients to make a perfect meal. Since my cooking abilities begin and end with boiling water for in the box mac and cheese, I leave it to you to decide how well it does.
Cons
- Would be useful if it explained how it works so you could learn more by using it
Asking the right question is most of the battle for getting good results from ChatGPT. It’s not that easy. But with Prompt Perfect, you don’t need to be an AI Prompt Engineer — yes, that’s a real job title these days — to get better answers.
Just start your query with “Perfect,” jot down the rest of it, and Prompt Perfect will take it from there. Of course, the better you can craft your queries, the better job Prompt Perfect can do for you.
Pros
- Works well for searching through YouTube transcripts for information quickly
Cons
- Only works on YouTube videos that already have transcripts
Some people learn really well from videos. YouTube has endless tutorials on any subject you can imagine. Some of us, like yours truly, learn best from the written word. For us, VoxScript can be a lifesaver. It can grab a video transcript and let you quickly pullout useful information
That’s good, but what it can’t do is generate transcripts from YouTube videos that don’t already have them. However, soon many more videos will come with transcripts. That’s because Google is integrating YouTube with its AI-powered dubbing and translation service, Aloud, to provide automatic YouTube transcripts.
You can also use it to search for current web information. While this is still very much a work in progress, VoxScript also lets you search Google results via DuckDuckGo. If they can perfect this, VoxScript will be a killer ChatGPT app.
Pros
- The expert system offers more accurate answers than any pure AI program available
Cons
- Eventually, there will likely be a monthly subscription rate
You may have noticed that I keep harping on how you can’t trust ChatGPT, or any of its rivals, for accurate answers. That’s because you can’t. The AI chatbots give you what sounds like the right answer. That does not mean it is the right answer.
You can use the WolframAlpha expert systems to get the correct answers to math problems and many other questions. Long before AI was anything except science fiction to the public, WolframAlpha was delivering accurate information to its customers. Indeed, accuracy is the name of its game.
Together you can get the benefits of both. Now, it’s not good for everything. Technical, medical questions: Yes. What do I do about the flu? Not so much. Stay home, sleep a lot, and eat lots of chicken soup.
But for those areas, such as math, physics, and finance, where it’s good, it’s very, very good indeed.
Cons
- Not all of the AI programs it finds will be high quality
If you’ve been digging into AI, you’ll have found out there’s a lot more than ChatGPT out there. Finding just the right AI program can be a major pain. Fortunately, for that problem, we have the self-explanatory There’s an AI for That plugin.
And, if your company is all excited about using it to replace you, remind them that according to this plugin, there’ are at least ten AI programs out there that can help put your CEO out on the unemployment line.
Seriously, it’s a very useful program if you’re getting deep into the AI weeds.
Pros
- Useful for finding your favorite shows across almost all the streaming services
Cons
- Doesn’t always give you accurate information
As you might have guessed from my numerous articles on the best online TV streaming platforms and best free streaming services, I watch a lot of television. Finding what services have the right shows is a major pain. There are websites that can help with that, but wouldn’t it be nice if ChatGPT could do it for you? Well, thanks to the What to Watch plugin, it can.
It’s not perfect, but it’s reasonably good. For example, it spotted my trick question about Homicide: Life on the Street. That’s one of the all-time great police movies, but it’s not available on any streaming platform. And, no, you can’t have my DVDs.
But, it does make the occasional goof. For instance, the 10th season of Father Brown is out now, but not all the streaming services it lists have the newly released 10th season.
Still, it’s a lot better than digging through one service after another for your favorite obscure show.
Pros
- Streamlines work organization tools
- Helps you debug your Zapier workflow actions
Cons
- Getting the actions to work just the way you want takes a good deal of effort
Some people use Microsoft Office programs. Me? I use the Google family and Slack for a lot of my work. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could organize it so that ChatGPT could, for example, pull out my schedule for the coming week from Google Calendar and then e-mail it to my co-workers via Gmail, and message my fellow Slackers with it on Monday morning? Thanks to the Zapier plugin, I can do exactly that.
Getting everything just right to pull these operations off can be tedious, but the Zapier plugin will help you work out the details. Once it’s done, you can use it from now until retirement.
It’s a nice trick, which you can use for much more advanced workflow processing. If you want to cut out a lot of busy work, give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.
As of this writing, there are nearly 200 ChatGPT plugins available. More are being added every day. The ones already here are also constantly being updated and improved.
With all that in mind, I looked over most of them. I dismissed the ones that don’t really add functionality already available in many other places. (For example, there’s a chess-playing plugin, but chess apps have long been available on every platform known to humankind. There’s no compelling case to use yet another one just because it runs on ChatGPT.) I also didn’t bother to look deeply into clearly half-baked plugins.
Instead, I picked plugins that I thought most people would find useful and that I found worked reasonably well.
Nope. Let me quote OpenAI: “Connecting language models to external tools introduces new opportunities as well as significant new risks.
Be careful. I treat ChatGPT as a tool for getting first impressions. It’s not — I repeat, not — something you can trust to give you accurate answers.
Except for WolframAlpha, I wouldn’t. Everyone else is new to this, and it shows. Even with the best intentions in the world, they make blunders. And, as OpenAI warns, “there’s a risk that plugins could increase safety challenges by taking harmful or unintended actions, increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead, or abuse others.”
Every other platform has bad actors and malware. There is no reason to believe it will be any different with ChatGPT plugins.
There’s currently a hard limit on how many plugins you can have active at once. You can switch them out, but only up to three can work at any given time. Also, remember that they don’t work well together yet.
Keep in mind, when you use plugins, you’re still limited to ChatGPT-4’s 25 queries every three hours. Once you pass that threshold, you’re dumped back to ChatGPT 3.5. So, before starting your session, be very clear about what you’re trying to achieve.
So, there you have it. Ten plugins, plus two extra, that turn ChatGPT from a mere chatbot into a full-blown digital assistant. These plugins go a long way to transforming ChatGPT into an everyday utility.
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